Technology continues to advances into every endeavor of human activity. Holiday decorations are no exception, particularly the artificial tree portion of the holiday lighting market.
For more than thirty years holiday lighting remained basically unchanged. However, today, technology has found its way into pre-lighted, artificial holiday trees. Unfortunately, problems are arising as electronic technology is applied in this new field. Light-emitting-diode-based lighting, power-efficient incandescent lighting, extra-long-life lighting, hybrid and special effects lighting—all demand new ways of converting, handling, and saving electric power—and all require the new approaches to be implemented successfully and safely. Family safety in the home is of paramount concern.
As the need for new components to manage, control and condition electrical power are realized, there arises the concomitant need for handling the side effects of power management, especially heat. Heat is the primary culprit for causing damage to electrical equipment. Heat, when not properly managed, can also result in smoke damage, even fires, significant impairment of the safe operation of electrical components, or the failure of power supplies, controllers and conditioning electronics.
Therefore, there is a need to address heat, by reducing its generation, and by limiting, isolating, capture, removing, and dissipating heat.
A helpful ally in this regard is the change from 120 VAC power, which is relatively dangerous, to the much safer, controllable DC power, for use in artificial tree lighting systems. New systems for power conversion from AC to DC, and power conditioning, distribution and microprocessor control are essential to the operation of artificial, pre-lighted, holiday trees. Unfortunately, the DC lighting systems have been applied to artificial tree decoration in less-than-optimal ways.
It is the intent of this invention to substantially mitigate the issue of heat and bring to the consumer an enclosed, safer, user-friendly, multi-functional apparatus suitable for supporting artificial holiday trees and their decorative systems.